Since January of 2019, when the Democrats took control of the House, the Committee on Ways and Means has sought to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Last week, after 1,329 days – “almost as long as the American Civil War,” as Rep. Bill Pascrell put it – those returns were finally turned over to the committee after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled without dissent that Trump could not block their release under the law.
The country already owes a great debt to Pascrell. He is the Oversight subcommittee chairman who has pursued government integrity with the persistence of a Paterson Rottweiler for 13 terms, and he has led the three-year battle for Trump’s tax records.
Now he’s on the clock, with House control shifting to the Republicans in just one month. But Pascrell’s resolve has put the committee in a unique position to show the country how Trump’s companies work, and what kind of disqualifying baggage the ex-president will bring to his next rodeo in 2024.
“I have led this fight for over five long years because it is bigger than one man or one party,” Pascrell said. “It is about accountability and fairness. I am sick thinking about all the taxpayer money that has been wasted. At long last the charade should . . . .be over.”
The documents are in the hands of Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal. From there, however, the timeline is unclear, though Neal hopes the committee can “now conduct the oversight that we’ve sought the last 3½ years.”
They won’t get any cooperation from Republicans, who voted 18 times in the last session to block resolutions seeking Trump’s tax returns. But in the four weeks remaining under Democratic control, the committee could comb the returns and, ideally, release a public report. They should also publish every return, which is not only legal, it has been done voluntarily by every president since Jimmy Carter.
Americans already know something about Trump’s financials from a 2020 investigation by the New York Times, which obtained two decades of tax return data from the alleged billionaire and his companies.
Some revelations were jaw-dropping: The Times revealed that Trump paid zero federal taxes in 11 of the 18 years of returns it obtained.
They also showed that in 2017 -- his first year as president -- Trump paid $750 in federal taxes. In 2018, he announced in his disclosure forms that he made at least $435 million, but his tax records showed a bottom-line loss of $47.4 million.
Still, it was not a complete picture, and the country has been left to guess what Trump could be hiding.
It could be something benign, such his need to hide the size of his reportedly shrinking portfolio.
It could be something that irritates a segment of his base, such as a longer record of tax avoidance.
It could be embarrassing, but not illegal – such as personal enrichment from the tax cut he pushed through in 2017.
But the returns could also contain information that raises more red flags on financial fraud or national security concerns, particularly if Trump was hiding loans received from foreign entities. Recall the Michael Cohen testimony before the House Oversight Committee in 2019, when he stated that Trump stood to make “hundreds of millions” in the potential construction of Trump Tower Moscow.
One thing we can agree on is that there’s something wrong with the tax system if a billionaire president doesn’t have to pay taxes. If this turns into a larger discussion about changing the tax code, that’s fine. But for now, we should at least hold those who flout the laws accountable, and we can be thankful that there are still watchdogs like Pascrell who enforce the ones we have.